Response to Dixon and Smith-Windsor

Smith-Windsor, J. (n.d.). The Cyborg Mother. Politics, Gender and Religion: Gender and Sexuality, 348-356.

This article is about her experience having a premature baby and watching as machines raised her daughter for the first month of her life.

Terms-
Cyborg - "part human, part machine, never completely either."- 349
Panopticism - "Being a cyborg reifies the repressive technologies of the pan optical illusion. To reify the panopticon inherently denies the possibility that there are ways of being, beyond the cyborg experience" -353

Quotes-
"14 February 2003 - I hold my child for the first time. She is naked, against my chest. Her ventilator curls around my neck, taped to my shoulder, disappears inside her. There are other tubes , too, taped to my other limbs by peach-colored surgical tape." -352

This gives me the visual of an umbilical cord. And that instead of being connected to her the first time the mother holds her daughter she is connected to the machines.

"The mother-child symbiosis provides the necessary relationship for infantile language to be communicated. The infant is incapable of distinguishing between 'sameness' and otherness', between 'subject' and 'object', between itself and the Mother. ... But what if this symbiotic relationship between mother and child were interrupted? What happens when technology begins to work itself into the infantile discourse severing the symbiosis between mother and child? What happens when the infant, instead, becomes incapable of distinguishing between itself and - the machine?" - 350

When she talks about the baby recognizing the machine as mother, that is so interesting. I know they call the first three months of a baby's life the 4th trimester, so I wonder what implications it has to have the baby be so close and connected to machines during that time. Does her daughter feel at home in a cold sterile hospital environment?

Dixon, S. (n.d.). Metal Performance: Humanizing Robots, Returning to Nature, and Camping About. Culture, Art, and Communication: Perception, 485-518.

Dixon argues that all art with robots (and sometimes humans) is either obviously camp or has camp overtones. (I wonder if this isn't more to do with the time frame that all of his art works are from.)

Terms-
metallic camp - "the word 'metallic' denotes not only the physical substance that the artists employ, but also its contemporary connotations within popular music and culture as signifying loud, aggressive, and resistant expression. This is juxtaposed with the knowing irony and pleasure of camp, which Susan Sontag defines as 'love of the unnatural:of artifice and exaggeration'." - 486

Quotes-
"Robots become more homelike through developments in artificial intelligence, and humans become more rootlike as they grow more alienated and remove from their own and others' humanity through their increasing reliance on technology." - 490-491

"The Czech word robot, variously translated as 'work', 'serf,' or 'forced labour', was adopted in the English-speaking world as 'robot' directly through the title of Karel Capek's 1921 expressionist play R.U.R. (Rose's Universal Robots). The play concerns the supplanting of humans by robots, and it has been widely discussed both as a warning against Frankensteinian scientific hubris and as an allegory of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, with the oppressed masses 'recast' as robots." - 492

"Metal Performance frequently highlights a postmodern concern to return to nature and the animal, and it often celebrates an eroticized sexuality of metal, with 'them fuckin' robots' both fucking (signaling the humanization of machines) and being fucked (signifying the mechanization of humans). Metal performances exalt in the conjunction of the hard and the soft, the natural and the technological, the metal and the meat." - 513